The uses of ethos. Discursive, sociological and political approaches

Abstract

Coming from Greek rhetoric and philosophy, in Aristotle's Rhetoric ethos refers, on the one hand, to the features that the speaker projects in his speech, and on the other hand, to his moral qualities, his values and virtues (Eggs, 1999). It can be said that in many formulations and analytical applications, discourse analysis tends to emphasize the first aspect, the ethos as a set of attributes projected in discourse, as discursive image. However, the notion of ethos is not limited by enunciation or argumentation. This category also entails –from the Aristotelian tradition but also in its sociological and theoretical-political meanings– attitudes, values and motivations. According to this background, in this work I wonder about the ethos’ evaluative, ethical and ideological dimension. To do this, I link the linguistic-discursive approaches with some sociological meanings that revisit and rework that notion. I take into account the contributions of Irving Goffman, Pierre Bourdieu and Max Weber about the ethos as a set of attitudes, beliefs and dispositions that generate practices, and propose to reflect on the theoretical implications of the various "uses" of ethos, both in the field of political discourse analysis and in political sociology.